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Abstract

Memory corruption, reading uninitialized memory, using freed memory, and other
memory-related errors are among the most difficult programming bugs to identify and
fix due to the delay and non-determinism linking the error to an observable
symptom. Dedicated memory checking tools are invaluable for finding these errors.
However, such tools are difficult to build, and because they must monitor all
memory accesses by the application, they incur significant overhead. Accuracy is
another challenge: memory errors are not always straightforward to identify, and
numerous false positive error reports can make a tool unusable. A third obstacle to
creating such a tool is that it depends on low-level operating system and
architectural details, making it difficult to port to other platforms and difficult
to target proprietary systems like Windows. This paper presents Dr. Memory, a
memory checking tool that operates on both Windows and Linux applications. Dr.
Memory handles the complex and not fully documented Windows environment, and avoids
reporting false positive memory leaks that plague traditional leak locating
algorithms. Dr. Memory employs efficient instrumentation techniques; a direct
comparison with the state-of-the-art Valgrind Memcheck tool reveals that Dr. Memory
is twice as fast as Memcheck on average and up to four times faster on individual
benchmarks.